You can’t fly from Raleigh-Durham to Nashville at an altitude of 1000 feet – there are mountains in the way! This wasn’t the first thought on my list of increasingly worrisome thoughts about five minutes into our flight out of Raleigh-Durham on a recent clear, sunny Sunday. The first “hmm” moment came when I realized […]
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“African aviation has the worst safety record in the world.” Over many years and millions of miles flying across the length and breadth of Africa, I had a true appreciation of that seemingly innocuous phrase. Yeah, well it’s still safer than crossing the road, isn’t it. Is it? Depends. One of the things it depends […]
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October 1st, 2011, a happy day for many in China – National Day – going away day, not-going-to-work-this-whole-week day! Hence, not many people were really bothered by the extremely inefficiently run check-in line at Aeroflot’s desk at Shanghai Pudong International Airport because we were all going on holiday – or so we thought. Boarding was […]
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This occurrence happened in 2005 when I was 15 and going on a round-the-world trip with my dad. We had landed at Heathrow after a 14 hour flight from Tokyo and had to change planes to fly to Paris. So we get onto a small BA Airbus without much trouble. Then as we are about […]
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This May while seated in the aircraft waiting to take off from McCarran airport in Las Vegas to Honolulu, I noticed one of the mechanics kept coming in and out of the cockpit. After a while we took off. About 2 hours somewhere over the Pacific, the flight attendants were serving drinks and I heard one […]
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Three years ago I was flying out of Newark Liberty Airport on an American Airlines flight. Being a Platinum frequent flier member, whenever a first class seat wasn’t available to me I would always go to the rear seats in the plane. I usually found that there was more room in that portion of the plane since most […]
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I was recently traveling from Pierre, South Dakota to Portland, Oregon along with my wife and four kids after attending a funeral. The trip was going great – the kids were well-behaved (we even got several compliments on their behavior), everything was on time or early, and we even had time for a quick lunch […]
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My dad and I flew from Denver to Farmington, NM on what can only be described as a crop duster back in 2007. When we got to the gate in Denver, which was our connection airport, the gate had been changed on us, twice. Once we finally got to the plane they told us we […]
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I was 13 when I met a passenger who took care of me and treated me like a son. Before I tell my story, I must explain the background situation. I was on a flight from Beijing to San Francisco when engine #1 was on fire. Apparently a passenger discovered this and notified the captain. […]
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Several years ago I was flying Delta Airlines on a short hop from North Carolina to Florida. It was a large plane and I was seated on the aisle in the front 1/3 of the plane. It was a normal boarding and taxi, but things got interesting on take-off. As the plane lifted off the […]
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I make my home in SE Alaska, so our only carrier is Alaska Airlines. On a southbound trip out of Sitka, I was seated in a window seat on the left side, just behind the wing. As I settled into my seat for the short flight, I noticed an anomaly on the left wing. You’ve […]
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I was on a flight from Caracas, Venezuela to Barcelona, Venezuela. It was a “dark and stormy night,” as they say, so we were bouncing around with lightning flashes punctuating the cabin with white flashes. We hit something, maybe a wind shear, or something like it. The plane plummeted sharply. We lost cabin pressure and […]
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